Alone Together
by the ramblin rose
Summary: Tarenn. AU. They're alone in the world with only their own feelings, ghosts of their past experiences, and each other to keep them company. Tara/Glenn


**AN: This is just a little one shot. I guess you could say it's AU/OOC because it takes place in a scenario that we haven't seen and I doubt will ever happen in the show. It's simply a story for entertainment value and to explore something (though not very in depth…I have thoughts for days) that I was discussing with Hanna (since she doesn't like me calling her liveinadive). **

**I hope you enjoy! Let me know what you think! **

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It happened all at once and in a fog that might have been equivalent to the fog that follows heavy drinking, except Glenn wasn't drunk, and neither was she. At least, neither of them were drunk off any traditional libation that they might have found tucked somewhere, still un-looted by passersby, but both of them were suffering from a saturation of sorts, even if it was simply a saturation of thoughts and feelings that they'd swallowed down for far too long and eventually had almost drown themselves in.

He had lost the woman that he thought was his whole world…the only woman that he would ever love or even could ever love. Even though he'd known the world that they lived in now was a world that allowed everyone a very limited space of time together, somehow he'd always believed that whatever benevolent deity it was that ruled over them all would be kind and would overlook them. The deity, whatever name it chose to call itself, would give him this…even if he didn't deserve it.

But in the end, he'd been no less looked over than anyone else who had lost the one person that made up a part of them…the one person that was so intrinsic to their sense of self that when they were left without them they felt like they were simply drowning in their reality, left without even the sense of self-preservation to swim.

She'd been drowning too. A lot longer than him and he knew that. She'd been drowning in having lost someone, but more than that, she'd been drowning in a lake of loneliness.

Seconds, minutes, and hours were all short when the end was near, but when you were alone and that was all that you knew…it was all that you could believe remained, they were long. They were longer, even, than years had once been.

And she was drowning in the feeling that each second was exactly like the last and would look exactly like the next. Each second was another long and hollow _tick_ to her life that echoed around in the emptiness that she felt.

They had ended up together, though through no contrived plan of either of them, travelling alone through the world, and they'd been doing so for some time. The end of the tracks had promised them sanctuary. It had promised a type of salvation for all who made their way there. But it hadn't delivered on that promise.

It had brought, instead of safety, sanctuary, and salvation, a wave of destruction and death that had swept through them and broken their group into even more fractured pieces than the Governor's last stand at the prison had done. In the final throes of their attempts to get free from people set on killing them all and dining on their flesh, Glenn had lost sight of everyone in a cloud of smoke and waves of fire and blood.

In the end he'd almost felt blinded by everything around him and he'd felt deaf afterwards because the voices raised in screams and protests, coupled with the sounds of explosions and gunfire, had left him almost unable to hear a thing.

The only sense that he'd retained after he managed, and he still didn't know how he had unless it was owing to the deity that he wanted to believe was a kind one, to escape from the place was his sense of touch. And it was only so much intact that he could feel, as right as things were supposed to feel, the sensation of her cool hand in his. His other half…his better half…the person he thought he had to have to survive…was clinging to him as they fled for their lives and could do nothing more than wish the best for those that they'd left behind.

But his survival wasn't as blessed as he'd hoped it would be. His survival had come at the cost of realizing, when they finally stopped because she couldn't go any farther, that much of the blood that she wore couldn't be attributed to some other source.

He'd begun drowning the moment that he put her down. He'd begun, then, to flail about in a sea of emotions that he couldn't begin to navigate. He'd wandered because that was the only thing for him to do.

He was alone for the first time. He was utterly and completely alone. He was the last living person on the face of the Earth. And what was the worst thing about it, was that at the moment he didn't care. He didn't even care to go on living.

So when he'd stumbled upon the abandoned house that he intended to call home until he felt like he could breathe again and he'd heard the bumping about inside, he'd almost welcomed the death would inevitably come by a Walker that he was too tired to fight.

But it hadn't been a Walker. It had been, much to his surprise, the same person that he'd stumbled upon when he'd found himself in the aftermath and destruction of the final stand of the prison. And she'd been wearing much the same expression then than she'd been wearing the first time they met. She was alone, she was terrified, and she was ready to give up.

And she was a perfect match for the likes of him.

So they'd travelled together, but they'd done it alone. Each of them had spent their travelling time in silence, both wallowing in their own sadness. Glenn lost track of the ticking on of the long seconds, minutes, and hours. He lost track of the rising of the sun and of the setting of the same thing. He lost track of it all and lived his life in a dull cloud of repetition…and she'd been seeming to do the same.

Until one night she'd asked him, almost the first words that she'd said to him since they found each other, what had happened when he'd left Terminus and what he knew about the others that they'd left behind.

And he'd come undone. He come completely and entirely undone in front of her. He wasn't ashamed of it and he wasn't interested in trying to hide his emotions. He had no one left to impress and no desire left to impress them even if they still existed.

She hadn't held his emotions against him, though. In fact, she'd come tumbling right after him and followed by letting out her own sorrows. He'd cried over his lost love, and she'd cried over the fact that she felt she might never be able to love again, over her lost ability to love.

They'd both mourned together and then they'd agreed not to speak of it again.

And for a while, they hadn't, but it felt forced to fill any time spent talking with the most ridiculous topics that they could come up with, since life around them didn't offer them much to discuss in the way of diversionary topics. They had talked about their lives before, movies they watched that they would never see again…music they'd forgotten the words to…books they'd read and forgotten mostly.

But there was always that something hanging over both of them. There was always the tension in the air about the things that were really on their minds.

There was always the feeling that both of them were drowning.

So when they had broken down again, hunkered in the middle of a dirty floor in an office building that they'd claimed as "home" for the night, or the closest thing that they ever found to home these days, they'd both let the feelings roll once more.

Because eventually the tears had to dry up and the fears had to subside. They couldn't go on forever. Pain and loss and doubt couldn't be the only things between them for however long they might continue until one of them found themselves as literally the last man standing.

And there, meaning to offer nothing more than comfort to one another, had been when it had happened. It had started as first the hug, the wrapping embrace of two people who were entirely alone and simply searching for a feeling that was anything more than that. From there, it had been the addition of the comforting back rub…the soothing stroke of someone who was trying, with the palms of their hands, to brush away the ache that the other felt.

And Glenn had never expected to do what he did when he initiated the first of the kisses. He hadn't even seen it coming for himself when he got the urge, and gave into it, to place a small and soft kiss on her cheek. He'd been driven by the warm feel of her skin to place another a little farther down, just at the corner of her mouth. She'd leaned into him, moaning slightly at finding the warmth of his lips on her skin as desirable as he found the warmth of her skin on his lips.

And she'd moved the last little fraction of an inch and brought them in for the first kiss of many. And the kisses went from soft and chaste to hungry kisses. They'd turned into the almost savage kisses of starving people. They were the kisses of suffocating people trying desperately to get their last life's breath from the lungs of another.

And taking the breath had been a small theft for both of them. From there, the whole thing had happened slowly at first, unfolding piece by piece, a dared touch at a time, until had almost burst the rest of the way and exploded into something that neither of them was prepared for, but both of them were hungry for.

He'd asked a thousand times if she liked wha they were doing. She'd insisted she had nothing to compare it with. He'd worried that, even though he never wanted the closeness they felt to end, it would end far too quickly. She'd assured him that time didn't matter.

And even once the act was done, they'd both stayed curled together, wrapped around one another, arms and legs tanged in a desperate hug for quite some time before she'd finally pulled loose from him and gotten up, leaving him on the pallet of dirty blankets and clothes on the floor and padding around the office space on bare feet without much explanation to him.

He didn't see her again for more than a few minutes, and when he did see her, she returned to the space wearing his shirt and the same sad expression that seemed to belong permanently to her, a flickering candle threatening to leak hot wax onto her hand. She sat, knees drawn into her chest, on the floor about a foot away from him.

Glenn rolled to an elbow.

"I'm sorry," he offered. "If I did something wrong. If it wasn't what you wanted. I'm sorry."

She shook her head slightly and pulled a lighter out of where she'd tucked it in the waistband of the underwear she'd found and put on. He watched as she melted the bottom of the candle enough to stick it firmly to the wooden floor beside her.

"You didn't do anything wrong," she offered. She wiped at her nose with the tail of the shirt that swallowed her more than he'd ever seen his clothes swallow anyone.

It seemed like they'd always been taught to say "I love you" or something similar in a situation like this, but it felt odd to think of saying anything like this in the world that they were in now, even if it might have true.

Because he did love her. And he believed that she loved him. Maybe they just didn't love each other in exactly the way those words were meant to express it…or maybe they just didn't understand what those words meant. They hadn't made up the meaning for them, after all, they'd simply followed the meaning that had been supplied to them by other people and by a society that had long since fell and was very nearly forgotten.

And Glenn didn't really need to ask why she looked sad. Everything leading up to what had happened explained why she looked sad. Sad had become the new normal.

Glenn felt oddly sad himself. He felt like he'd lost something, even though he hadn't realized before that he was even holding onto it anymore.

He sat up, wrapping the sheet around himself as a cover.

"That's the first time I've done that since…" He said.

From the way Tara looked at him, rolling her big dark eyes toward him, he knew there wasn't any need to continue.

He laughed to himself, the first time in a while that he'd experienced that particular act, and this time it was more out of embarrassment or shame than real humor.

"I'm sorry," he said. "Maggie was really only the second person for me…and…I probably have a lot to be sorry about," he admitted, scratching his hands through his overgrown hair to give them something to do as he worked through the nerves that were beginning to perk up out of a long dead slumber.

"I'm sorry about Maggie," Tara offered.

Her words were sincere, and she hadn't addressed the apology that he'd made for the thing they were both, if not regretting, at least pondering at the moment, but then she laughed a little herself. It was the first time he'd seen her smile spread across her lips in a long time as well.

"I'm a very bad lesbian," Tara offered.

Glenn shook his head.

"I don't think it matters," he said.

Tara chuckled to herself again, the smile fading into a half smile as she apparently thought of something.

"I still think Hayley Williams was hot," Tara offered.

Glenn just appreciated the expression on her face and the odd lightness that was peeking around the edges of the heavy cloud that seemed to have been smothering them both forever.

"You would," Glenn teased.

"You don't?" Tara asked, raising her eyebrows at him.

He shrugged.

"Yeah," he said. "I guess so."

Silence fell between the two of them. It was a silence that Glenn might have expected to be awkward and uncomfortable, given the fact that sex still hung in the air around them. But, if anything, the silence that fell between them at that moment, both of them momentarily having let go of a little piece of the heaviness that had been weighing them down for the last longest, was lighter than it had been.

It was comfortable and it was _comforting._

And Glenn thought to himself, all at once, that maybe that's what the whole thing had been about anyway. It wasn't, of course, that he didn't find Tara attractive…though he wouldn't venture to say at the moment what she thought about him, even if she had commented once or twice that he was "cute"…but the sex hadn't been about sex at all.

"I don't think it was about sex," he said, breaking the silence and offering the thought to Tara.

Tara looked at him, the smile dropped for the moment, but her face relaxed instead of drawn into the frown that had become so typical these days.

She shook her head slightly.

"Me either," she admitted.

Glenn sucked in a breath and rearranged himself, starting to expand on his thoughts probably three times before he ever managed to get another word out that his brain thought it could be happy with.

"Maybe it's about not being alone?" He asked.

Tara shook her head slightly.

"We're still alone," she said, running her hand over the candle flam at a height that made it appear that her hand was close enough to be burning, but clearly it wasn't. All it truly accomplished was shifting and swaying the flame and making the small bit of light in the room dance with the shadows. "We're all alone."

She paused a moment, watching the flame, and then returned her eyes to him.

"But maybe it was just about…being alone together?" She offered.


End file.
